


The Weight of the World (jaylen hotdogfingers knows what she must do)

by Silvereye



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: (sort of), Character Study, Gen, Ghosts, Light Angst, POV Second Person, Seattle Garages (Blaseball Team), Sleep Deprivation, season 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 17:55:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30059337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/pseuds/Silvereye
Summary: You're back in Seattle. Back home, you'd say, but at this point you honestly don't know what home is.Jaylen is back in Seattle. There's another attempted resurrection in the works. She doesn't know what she can do about it. Which is a lot to handle, but at least she isn't entirely alone.(or, Jaylen in the end of Season 13 up to the Elections.)
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers&Theodore Duende
Kudos: 7





	The Weight of the World (jaylen hotdogfingers knows what she must do)

You're back in Seattle. Back home, you'd say, but at this point you honestly don't know what home is. Home is... where they must accept you when you arrive – but that's all of them (regulations of the ILB) and none (you are, technically speaking, a serial killer). Where you hang your uniform? In which case you've had ten over your career. The place where you've stayed for more than a year? Well, then home is San Francisco and Charleston and the blue twilight of the land of the dead, and, yes, Seattle. Once.

The smell of rain in the Northwest is still deeply, gut-punchingly familiar. Good enough.

They've erected a ballpark in your name. You weren't unaware of the plans – they didn't exactly hide the blueprints from you when you returned. And you weren't entirely unaware of the name. You were the first person to ever die in blaseball. That's a weighty thing. No matter that so many Garages players died after you, that going up like a bonfire is not a rare occurrence any more. The first to burn will get a memorial. Most of the rest don't.

Still. _The Hotdogfingers Memorial Climate Pledge Garage and Parking Facility._ The Big Garage, if the full name is too much of a mouthful.

Sometimes you go to the roof of roof and sit there with the crows that inevitably find you and laugh about it all. No one can hear you, this high up, and that's a comfort. You don't really want to be heard, sometimes.

NaN got it, back when you both played for the Lovers. Went out walking with you, to the desolate places that exist even in a city of millions, where you could laugh as long and loud as you wanted in the middle of a cloud of corvids, and they could talk to the birds in their mostly-wrecked barely-there voice. It was companionable. One chew toy of the universe recognizing the other, or maybe the creed of the introvert: I cannot stand people today, but you're not people. Then you flickered away from the Lovers, and then NaN did. Nothing remains still forever.

There is no other direction but forward. Everyone seems to think that, these days. No more Discipline Era, only Peace and Prosperity, and then Expansion. The Peanut is dead, and the Monitor seems to like you all, and the Boss... is deeply suspect, but hasn't killed anyone yet, which is an improvement over vengeful peanut gods.

You've stopped dreaming about the people you've killed. The last of those dreams was a few weeks before the end of the long siesta. In it, you went out for coffee with Boyfriend Monreal and it was all fine until you walked him home, which suddenly turned into the old Kansas City stadium, the one where you killed him. Or marked him to death, same diff. You gasped awake from that one.

You thought you'd dream after the game where Esme Ramsey, she of Shoe Thieves and literal ghosts was up against you and inhabited by Sebastian Telephone. You had killed Sebastian, and then had watched him die a second death, go up in flames like you once did. Seeing him behind Esme's eyes, batting... should have brought back memories. But it didn't, and that seemed like good enough evidence that you'd passed some milestone of healing.

Which is why the whispers that some team is planning on another resurrection is both unsurprising and infuriating. You can't figure out which, except that it isn't any of the expansion teams, and that makes it more infuriating still. Mathematics decree that most of the enterprising resurrectors must have been there when you were paying off your debt. They should _remember_.

But then, it has been sixteen years. Children born during the season where you killed people are in high school by now. Maybe they really _don't_ remember.

You can't figure out who the resurrectors are. Probably someone else could – fuck, the Houston Spies definitely know, but you haven't really talked to Comfort in the past decade and can't ask now, can you?

The day of the elections creeps closer. You sleep worse. Then not at all. It shouldn't be possible to stay awake this long without heavy-duty chemical assistance, but it is and you do. The others notice and say nothing. It's not like they don't know what you're thinking. Teddy Duende does his captain's duty and tries to gently convince you to go to bed, the way he always used to back when you two were in the minor leagues. Both times you _look_ at him wordlessly and it suffices.

You're floating. Almost. The way you floated back in season 7, every time you hit someone with a pitch.

Are they going to bring back a pitcher? In that case you're... not safe, you remember how infectious Instability was, but still safer than a batter. If it's a batter... well. You don't know how that would work. There's no theory to things like these. Only the practice, and you were all of it.

"Stop wallowing," Teddy says. Except, no, not Teddy. Sebastian Woodman. And _that_ cannot be right, because Sebastian is playing for the Shoe Thieves and thus still in Charleston. You stare at him. He smiles and says: "Stop wallowing, Jay. It'll be fine."

O-kay.

"I'm hallucinating," you say. "The sleep deprivation. It's fucking with my head."

"Probably," Sebastian says, except now he's someone else again. Grey Alvarado. You've never visited their team, but you remember them vaguely anyway. "I know I'm not really here. But it doesn't matter. You're going to be fine."

"I don't _want_ to be fine," you say and don't know how much of it you mean. "I have to stop it. Them. The new necromancers."

 _The New Necromancers_ would be a really good song title. You laugh. It comes out wrong.

"You have to do fuck all," the hallucination (the ghost?) of Annie Roland says. "Believe me. The future of the League doesn't rest on the shoulders of one Jaylen Hotdogfingers. You don't have to stop every fresh bullshit in ILB."

"But I do. I'm the best reminder of how high the price of bringing someone back is." You exhale, and it's shaky.

"Oh, Jaylen," Annie-who-is-now-Boyfriend-Monreal says, in his warmest voice. You know he uses (used) it with most of the people he meets, you never really were in love with him (more than usual, that is, everyone is (was) a little in love with Boyfriend Monreal), and still it calms you. Your hallucinations have a line to your nervous system, apparently, which actually does make a lot of sense. You open your eyes. Look at him, at his pristine Mints uniform. He looks back, kind and a little amused. Then leans closer.

"Jaylen, darling," he whispers, and the edge of his impossible breath brushes your face, and you cannot tell if it's cold like the Hall or only cool like menthol. "The world does not _care_. Do you really think we would all have survived if not for you? Or Released, if not for you?"

You're still thinking about it when he kisses you on the forehead, gentle and warm, and then you're alone again. The sun is coming up. You curl up on the sofa and think about this impossibility, and must fall asleep, because the next thing you notice is flesh-and-blood Teddy trying to be unobtrusive about laying a blanket on the huddle of you. You smile a little, half-asleep. He says: "Goddamn, Jaylen, I thought you'd never sleep again," so low that you almost don't hear it, and then quietly leaves the break room.

Feels good. Feels like a reprieve.

A few days later it really is the election. You all gather in the dreamworld unstadium where the results are called. It's... quiet, in the beginning, the way elections usually aren't. Lots of Infusions. Lots of player swaps. Not the worst you've seen in elections by far.

You have a twice-revenant's sensitivity for forbidden magic and so you sense the ritual before any other bystander. Turn to the distant corner of the stadium, where there's a huddle of pink. The Mills? No, not Mills, the Flowers, and there are also a few figures in dark green. Flowers taking point and Mints assisting, the same one-two ritual your team did with the Wild Wings.

You take off at a sprint. Don't even have time to swear. Don't know what you're going to do. Your magical aptitude is roughly zero and you're not much of a sprinter, really. Somewhere behind you Teddy says "Jaylen?" and " _shit_ " and starts running, too, but you're both too far away. The humming in the air is getting louder.

Someone screams: " _Have you lost your fucking minds?_ " The pink-and-green knot of people twitches. You can almost see the summoning circle. The necromancers had been standing on it, to conceal it, but now they're stepping back...

and Jessica Telephone slides into the circle like it's the home plate at the bottom of the ninth.

Lightning strikes the circle, but you can tell even from this distance that the ritual is disrupted.

You blink the afterimages away, walk to the broken circle. Jessica is half-kneeling in the ruin of it, one hand covering her left eye. There's dirt in her hair. She's dropped the Dial Tone and it's lying in the long-suffering grass a few feet away.

The rest of the Flowers draw back. Don't meet your eyes, and, yeah, some of them really should have known better, but they're not important right now.

You don't know what to say, so you offer your hand wordlessly.

Jessica takes it, lets you pull her to her feet. There's a fractal tracery on her left cheekbone and temple now, as if the lightning was real, not only magic. It's the exact hue of the twilight in the Hall.

She could say: I _know your death toll, Hotdogfingers, and I'm never letting another revenant into ILB._

Or: _you killed my brother and I haven't forgotten._

Or: _don't think this makes us friends. It's much too late for that._

Jessica says none of those things. Holds on to your wrist for a second, her hands cool and calloused from the bat. Meets your eyes, nods, lets go.

"And Stijn Strongbody gains Flippers!" the Commissioner says somewhere in the other end of the stadium. "Uhh, congratulations, Stijn, congratulations to the Lift, and of course congratulations to our sponsors..."

"Think that's it," Teddy says a few steps behind you.

You nod. Turn around, away, walk back to him. No revenants. No debts to be paid in blood and ashes. It really is going to be okay.

"We got a new kid on the team," Teddy says. "Magi Ruiz. Don't know if you heard the Commissioner with all that." He gestures vaguely at the bouquet of Flowers behind them.

"Teddy," you say. "I think I'm going to quit playing."

He looks at you and doesn't argue. "Alright. Shadows swap?"

He can't get you Released. No one can, except maybe the Monitor and you've declined that honor once. But Shadows sounds nice enough. "Going to get Mike out?"

He smiles. "Nah. Sophy."

"She'll be good."

"Yeah."

You're going to be fine.

**Author's Note:**

> The Season 13 Elections definitely gave me a fright or five and all that adrenaline from "oh god, another resurrection?" made me fully forget that Returned mod was a thing. So I spent a good hour trying to figure out how recently-resurrected Sutton Picklestein returned to the Hall of Flame. Or, like I said somewhere else: "I don't quite understand *how*... so I'll elect to believe it was a veteran player going "I was there, Gandalf" about the last time a Debt was paid and stopping the ritual."
> 
> The Garages are not my Team(TM), but I am love them, and Jaylen, a lot.


End file.
